I severely doubt the racials are the only things driving the win / loss rates. I doubt they'd made that much of a difference at all really.

You can't just blanket win / loss statistics, you'd need to analyze everything:
Race, class, spec, food buffs, flasks... and of course, skill level... which could "kind of" be measured by what % of players possess certain achievements (On a whole most people earn curve / cutting edge / rating / gladiator, etc, not buy them for real or in game money) and their performance on logs, what % of these people do arena, at what rating etc.

There could be so many contributing factors that I doubt changing the racials would make any difference at all. Maybe horde players use more foodbuffs? Maybe more gnomes use flasks in Alterac Valley? Maybe the Stables is too close to the alliance gate in Arathi basin? Maybe the warsong hold is more challenging to assault?

The racials seems a very specific and niche factor. You'd also have to scrutinize a whole lot of other factors to even come close to decent data suggesting something as minor as a racial ability is a determining factor.

There is no major imbalance between Horde and Alliance racials. Escape Artist, Stoneform, Every Man For Himself and Shadowmeld are very strong.

On my gnome warlock, Escape Artist gets me out of root-beam if a boomy decides to try that. I would be noticeably more dangerous with blood fury or beserking, particularly since I could stack them with a concordance proc and soul harvest

On my gnome warlock, Escape Artist gets me out of root-beam if a boomy decides to try that. I would be noticeably more dangerous with blood fury or beserking, particularly since I could stack them with a concordance proc and soul harvest

I said they are "very strong" not they are "very strong for all classes and specs in every scenario". Obviously, there are classes/specs that can make more use of certain racials than others.

I don't know if there's just one answer or maybe there is.
Maybe alliance just isn't as hardcore as horde is in the competitive element of random pvp.
Maybe why they excel at arena and rbgs is that they put all their effort to that.
No idea, i'm alliance, but i don't do any rated pvp.
I do random bgs and that's about it. I played a lot of pvp in WoD just because it was too good of a change to miss on my warrior. At the end his win% was close to 90, i think 87 was the exact number, but that's the most pvp i've ever done, just to get back so many years worth of being the bunching bag and honor bot of the horde from previous expansion.

Now I do what's necessary for the prestige grind, but i don't compete my heart out.
I don't have a burning passion for the pvp scene, never did. If i can afk my way to a win, i'll do exactly that, what ever is the path of least resistance.
Challenge, competition, admiration, esports, ratings, ambition, are words that have zero meaning to me.
You can be the laziest fuck in the room and still be the most successful one, it depends on the goals.

I want to point out that I'm the only one in this conversation that doesn't dip into bouts of vitriol. It's frankly really hard for me to justify replying to you when there isn't a mutual level of respect.

Yes, gear matters to a substantially small degree. Are you trying to say that the maybe 4% power bonus that one character has over another is a major contribution to Horde having a 10% higher winrate? Merc mode was something I overlooked in my original post where I also explicitly said "[if I] haven't considered other things, I'm curious to know" and I am better off for it. With the matter of the enlistment bonus now properly debunked, since it was a matter of participation, there is still the issue of Alliance being (almost always) underperforming against Horde, even moreso in this expansion. This is clearly not something that matters to you or intrigues you in the slightest; you've made that abundantly clear. Are you trying to get me to admit that it doesn't matter? Because it's still an aspect of the community that is interesting to me.

We talk a lot on this forum about ways that the game could be made better. AV and IoC design being inherently in Alliance favor is a good example of that. I guess I just don't see the need to get so defensive over this.

A) Fair point about vitriol, even if barely. Still fair nonetheless and I offer an apology and will try to avoid doing so in the future with you.
B) My characters have 13%+ increase to stats. So if someone is new and has no gear, 13% is a huge difference.
C) Kinda touching up on what Redecle said, each expansion, historically, has always caused a flip flop on faction balance. The top end PvE/PvP players trying to min/max and get that extra .5% edge pick a faction with said edge and then people who google/lookup to see what the 'best' is do the same and with them their friends follow. So what happens is the bulk of 'good' players end up on one faction and can cause a disparity. Happens every expansion and every expansion I am laughed at when I tell people that. Next expansion will favor Alliance for PvP, mark my words.
D) I'm more curious was to why you think there's something more worth digging? I'm not trying to be defensive, just trying to argue from the other side of the fence. I'm not trying to tell you that it doesn't matter, just want to know what's really left to explore?

Originally Posted by Willhouse

Chill,wow classic is gonna last 2 months top once ppl see how horrid it was,theres gonna be 10k ppl online across all classic realms within 2 months.Meanwhile i'm preparing my "i told you so.." speech XD

WoW expansions always had faction imbalance in PVP with random BGs always favoring one of the factions significantly. Globally, a difference in winrates of 2% is very noticeable, a difference of 5% is impossible to ignore and anything higher than that (which is where WoW sits solidly every time) is disastrous. The linked graphs show that. There were graphs for the periods not covered by the current site, too, they also showed the skews.

They should have mixed players between factions on BGs a long time ago to make the imbalances disappear.

The problem is, we are talking about the PVP team for WoW. A terrible team on a terribly mismanaged product.

There is zero hope they will do anything sensible.

So, learn to live with the imbalances. (Which generally boils down to (a) join the winning side OR (b) intentionally go to the losing side and always queue in a group of 5 overgeared and overexperienced PVPers so that you roflstomp the "winners" AND have short queues. I was doing (b) for two expansions and it is damn easy to do. Me and my friends were just playing arenas on the "winning" side and were jumping to characters on the other side to farm HKs whenever we felt like it. Short queues and a winrate of 85%.)

Alliance winrates are definitely not at an all time low, and saying they have always been low is also a lie. Alliance has been the dominant faction many times over the years, mostly due to the human racial.

Having said that, doing random BGs as Alliance atm is indeed cancer. Personally I have completely stopped queueing as Alliance because all smart people have done so and I don't like playing with the rest. The win ratios are not nearly as uneven as they have been in the past, BUT the quality of players on both sides is hugely discrepant. Especially as a healer the probability of having fun are much higher queueing as Horde.

Ultimately the problem is that the PvP community does not like losing and has and will continue to always swing to one faction or another. It was Alliance when the human racial was clearly more powerful than all other racials, and it has been Horde every time they evened out the racials. I do think there is a positive bias towards Horde from the PvP community; whenever racials are balanced people flock to the Horde side and make it the winning side. Arcane torrent being so incredibly good now and good old blood elf popularity is not helping the situation.

The point is that factions will always trend towards imbalance until Blizzard forces us to go the other way. Tinkering with racials will never be a permanent solution. Balancing the racials will only lead to Horde domination. Another solution has to be come up with, such as allowing factions to fight each other in BGs. I don't know if Blizzard even cares all that much about faction balance though, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Also for the people just looking at the graph, keep in mind that Alliance winrates are always padded by AV and IoC, and furthermore EotS is not included in any statistics because of an old bug in the game. If you were to correct for this, the actual winrates would be far more discrepant than they appear in the graph.

Also for the people just looking at the graph, keep in mind that Alliance winrates are always padded by AV and IoC, and furthermore EotS is not included in any statistics because of an old bug in the game. If you were to correct for this, the actual winrates would be far more discrepant than they appear in the graph.

Exactly.

Also, this old bug with EotS that you mention is very characteristic of the ability of WoW PVP team and the degree to which WoW devs care about PVP. They will swear in the interviews that they care about PVP a lot and practically dream it and play it in the hallways, but then you look at EotS not being counted in the stats for what seems to be 5 years now (more?) and you understand that maybe they "care" but they certainly don't care enough to do even the littlest thing and fix even the most obvious stupid bugs. For half of the decade.

depends on the day, the players online, and what i feel like playing
i have recently returned and been playing horde, not winning as much as i would prefer, but i dont mind practicing my own skills
i also have many alliance characters, which i feel like win a decent amount... but not always

i feel like opposite teams and sides always complain... for a while i remember alliance was super OP in bg's especially in late MOP and a good chunk of WOD

The horde racials favor more agressive play and are mostly offensive things and the alliance ones are all(?) defensive ones.
The blood elf racial is without doubt the best racial for pvp since human got nerfed. A free interrupt can make a game or give enough time to make the play.

At the start of legion many people transferred to horde and that had a snowball effect. It was not that big like many proposed but in the end you could feel it.
Horde often follows bg strats and don't let 6 people capture farm while most of the rest run mine in AB as an example.

Every spec with a throughput cooldown can leverage the on-demand racials significantly, and in legion PVP where burst is king there's no doubt that the horde racials can be a significant advantage

But I certainly do not believe that it's the racials that are the main difference between the factions, I just see horde teams playing better on average

There are ways to counter every single on-demand racial out there. If you're against a caster, silence, stun, or interrupt them ( something every single class in the game has including every single healing spec). If you're against a melee, run away. Congrats, they just blew their CD and have nothing to do now. What do you know, you're back to an "even" playing field but you as a gnome still have an escape mechanic if they decide to root you.

Well the alliance loses so much cayse they have too many kids on and aren't well coordinated like how horde are..

And people wonder why the PVP community is seen as salty and unfriendly <3

This is exactly the reason why people can complain "Not enough people PVP", because this is the general image of the PVP players, over compensating people having to dmean others to make themselves feel better.

This has been the case for over 10 years. One faction will always be totally imbalanced do to the fact that Blizzard is here to make money. People keep faction swapping every expansion because of racial changes, and thanks to Blizzards think tank that literally plans this shit out: you can bet your fucking ass that Alli will be on top next expac along with millions of faction transfers/gold tokens being purchased.

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by 8bithamster

And people wonder why the PVP community is seen as salty and unfriendly <3

This is exactly the reason why people can complain "Not enough people PVP", because this is the general image of the PVP players, over compensating people having to dmean others to make themselves feel better.

You forgot to mention the PVE scene as well. You've never seen a failed high level mythic+ key before and seen more nerdrage and threats to my life like you've ever seen until you've witnessed wow's bullshit-coat tail riding-carebear scene until you attempt 'somewhat' challenging content.

PVP is just the same. Sure if you're riding the below challenger train... (soldier for rbg), then it doesn't matter if you lose anyway: same with random BG's: they mean absolutely nothing, they are the LFR of PVP..

You will find fail in any part of wow the deeper you go - welcome to the internet

There are ways to counter every single on-demand racial out there. If you're against a caster, silence, stun, or interrupt them ( something every single class in the game has including every single healing spec). If you're against a melee, run away. Congrats, they just blew their CD and have nothing to do now. What do you know, you're back to an "even" playing field but you as a gnome still have an escape mechanic if they decide to root you.

I completely agree, but then I can bait your stun/silence/interrupt and pop after. Or we think about the play in random BGs and notice how often we can tuck ourselves out of the way and freecast. Or in the special case of warlocks who already have dots widely spread on the opposition, it doesn't matter if you silence/stun/interrupt them one second after they've popped cos all those dots are empowered and ticking (RIP snapshotting).

Players are potentially more dangerous when they have cooldowns they can stack, there's nothing controversial about that as a statement. But it's up to the player (and the opposition) whether that potential can be realised in play, hence I stand by my opinion that it's not the racials that account for the difference in the factions.

Or in the special case of warlocks who already have dots widely spread on the opposition, it doesn't matter if you silence/stun/interrupt them one second after they've popped cos all those dots are empowered and ticking (RIP snapshotting).

If you die to warlock dots because of them popping a racial or trinket, you were going to die anyways. Most of the damage you get is from their direct damage spells not their dots.